Corporate Control over Genetic Resources Threatens Biodiversity

More than 3.5 million people starved to death in the Bengal famine of 1943. Twenty million were directly affected. Export of food grains continued in spite of the fact that people were going hungry. At the time, India was being used as a supply base for the British military. More than one-fifth of India’s national output was appropriated for war supplies. The starving Bengal peasants gave up over two-thirds of the food they produced. Dispossessed peasants moved to Calcutta. Thousands of female destitutes were turned into prostitutes. Parents started to sell their children.

As the crisis began, thousands of women organized in Bengal in defense of their food rights. “Open more ration shops” and “Bring down the price of food” were the calls of women’s groups throughout Bengal.

After the famine, the peasants also started to organize. At its peak the Tebhaga movement, as it was called, covered 19 districts and involved 6 million people. Everywhere, peasants declared, “We will give up our lives, but we will not give up our rice.” In the village of Thumniya, police arrested some peasants who resisted the theft of their harvest. They were charged with “stealing paddy.”

A half-century after the Bengal famine, a new and clever system has been put in place that is once again making the theft of the harvest a right and the keeping of the harvest a crime. Hidden behind complex free-trade treaties are innovative ways to steal nature’s harvest of seed and nutrition.

Ifocus on India both because I am an Indian and because Indian agriculture is being especially targeted by global corporations. However, this phenomenon of the stolen harvest is not unique to India. It is being experienced in every society, as small farms and small farmers are pushed to extinction, as monocultures replace biodiverse crops, and as farming is transformed from the production of nourishing and diverse foods into the creation of markets for genetically engineered seeds, herbicides, and pesticides.

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For centuries, Third World farmers have evolved crops and given us the diversity of plants that provide us nutrition. Indian farmers evolved 200,000 varieties of rice. They bred rice varieties such as Basmati. They bred red rice and brown rice and black rice. They bred rice that grew 18 feet tall in the Gangetic floodwaters and saline-resistant rice that could thrive in coastal water.

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